Old masters will not fade in a flash

IF you fire your flashgun at the Mona Lisa you could change the way she smiles - but only very slightly. Art galleries around the world ban flash photography for fear that the intense light could wash the colour out of their old masters. But David Saunders, a conservation scientist at the National Gallery in London, says they are worrying about nothing.

After firing flashes at samples of paper painted with water colours, Saunders found that the light from flashguns is no more harmful than the soft, controlled light of most galleries. Degradation of the pigments in a painting depends on a combination of the intensity of light and the time the painting is exposed to it. "While the light output from a photographic flash is high, it lasts only one thousandth of a second," says Saunders. "The same damage would be caused if an object was exposed to a ...

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